In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • François Rabelais et le scandale de la modernité: pour une herméneutique de l'obscène renaissant by Peter Frei
  • Jonathan Patterson
François Rabelais et le scandale de la modernité: pour une herméneutique de l'obscène renaissant. Par Peter Frei. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 548; Études rabelaisiennes, 55.) Genève: Droz, 2015. 264 pp.

This learned study follows on from and develops the author's previous work on obscenity, notably his contribution ('Le Scandale de Rabelais: une Renaissance contre-nature') to the collective volume edited by Hugh Roberts, Guillaume Peureux, and Lise Wajeman (Obscénités renaissantes (Geneva: Droz, 2011), pp. 349–61). As previously, Peter Frei's work on the subject is done to a high standard. It is grounded in well-established Rabelaisian scholarship that continues to foster productive new lines of research. Frei is unashamedly Bakhtinian in his approach to obscenity in Rabelais, but not uncritical of the great Soviet theorist: he reads Rabelaisian ambivalence towards obscenity with and against Bakhtin, through a critical prism that is, he fully acknowledges, greatly indebted to the work of Terence Cave and Michel Jeanneret, and more generally, to Greenblatt, Foucault, and Derrida. Frei's central contention is that the scandal of obscenity in Rabelais is not a simple matter of sex. It is something much more disturbing, which — through a profusion of metaphor, analogy, various onomastic techniques, and authorial disavowals — presents a profound hermeneutical challenge to readers. In order to situate such a slippery quarry, Frei looks not to definitions or ideal types, but instead provides a 'matrice permettant de mieux saisir le jeu et les enjeux de l'obscène chez Rabelais' (p. 22). Methodologically, this is an astute move. Frei organizes his study as a pre-history (in the Cavean sense) of obscenity, in which Rabelais's texts and other early modern writings clustering around them all aggressively negotiate (à la Greenblatt) the language and meanings of what comes to be considered 'obscénité' and 'obscène'. In and between the textual traces of such a struggle emerges an insalubrious symbiosis of scabrous writings about sexual sins ('luxure', 'paillardise') and actual physical disease (syphilis); gradually this metastasizes to into broader forms of profanity ('désordres' and 'dissolutions'), corrupting civil and [End Page 104] religious conduct and even language itself en masse. Rabelais is roundly denounced by a number of Protestant and Catholic foes who nonetheless seem more than willing to 'rabeliser' in an obscene idiom when it suits their polemical purposes. This dense contextualization of Rabelais's scabrous writings is the chief merit of Frei's rich study. Frei moves Rabelais adroitly between a number of literary and theological discourses issuing from Petrarch, Erasmus, Marot, Calvin, Bèze, Viret, and many lesser figures. He is sensitive to ongoing debates in études rabelaisiennes concerning the extent to which idealized and grotesque, putrefying bodies reciprocally suggest the other (and how far this is a continuation from medieval models). For Frei, the chief fascination of the obscene lies in its troubling hermeneutic potential; visual images are not considered. Rabelais's relation to pornography is suggested briskly — and textually. Nonetheless, graphic reproduction of some of the cartoon-like, hybrid Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel discussed en route would have been helpful. This is only a minor detraction from a study that will appeal to Rabelais scholars and beyond.

Jonathan Patterson
St Hugh's College, Oxford
...

pdf

Share